Taxi app Uber's $1bn uber price tag: CEO speaks out

Travis Kalanick, the chief of taxi service app Uber, has denied that his company is about to open a new funding round that would value it at over a billion dollars.

Kalanick tweeted that the company hadn't spoken to a single investor about raising new cash injections since November 2011, after reports suggested that Uber was mulling a new round of fundraising.

A familiar person had toldReuters that an investor was the one who reached out to a venture capital firm about a potential new funding round, not the company itself, making neither the source's nor Kalanick's comments mutually exclusive.

It's possible that the investor put the word out to see if anyone would be interested in the firm at that price without having a formal fundraising round in mind; a tactic that's not unheard of from tech startups.

Kalanick didn't say whether the $1bn valuation was outrageous or not. His company's app lets customers quickly book a ride in a limousine or a more ordinary motor in San Francisco, New York and other bustling cities of North America.

He was, however, quite forthright on Twitter about the reports:

.@uber hasn't spoken to a single investor about raising $ since Nov '11. Any reports to the contrary (i.e. Reuters) are completely false